Mr Mark Francois
MP for Rayleigh and Wickford · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Secondly, what actions is he as Defence Secretary, no doubt in consultation with the Chief of the General Staff, taking to push back against these pernicious in-year funding cuts imposed by the Treasury?”
“Taking him at his word, I must press him on some extremely worrying reports—first published in The Times on 3 September, and amplified in the Defence Eye journal on Tuesday—that British Army training is being seriously curtailed in order to provide in-year efficiency savings— “cuts”, in pub English— at the Treasury’s behest.”
“I am sure that I speak for the whole House in paying tribute to the Ukrainians for their fierce and determined resistance. They are fighting for the values of freedom and democracy, which this House has represented for centuries, so when we say, “Slava Ukraini!”, we mean it.”
“On behalf of the shadow Defence team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new Defence Secretary—Labour’s third in three months—to his place and to thank him for advance sight of this important statement.”
“Tragically, a number of innocent civilians were murdered in Kyiv last night. On supporting Ukraine and brave President Zelensky, there has been absolute solidarity between ourselves and the Labour party.”
“On housing numbers, there is no Reform MP present this afternoon, but Reform-led Rochford district council has just published its regulation 19 local plan.”
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“Accompanied by the overt pressure on Ukraine, which does not possess an article 5 guarantee, were that treaty to succeed, the next step will probably be to exert pressure on countries, some of which contain significant ethnic Russian minority populations which do possess such a guarantee, and that probably means the Baltic states, with the obvious aim of dividing and ultimately breaking NATO in the process. I sincerely hope that we are not going to be told, perhaps some months or years from now, even from that famous Dispatch Box, that Estonia is, after all, “a far away country…of whom we know nothing”. That is exactly what the Russians want. Russians traditionally admire strength and despise weakness, and what they now perceive is a weakened NATO lacking in resolve to assert its democratic right to collective self-defence.”
“As the Defence Committee, on which I serve, has highlighted many times before, we need to be spending more on defence in this country, not less. Moreover, weighed down with covid-related debt and with international gas spot prices now at near record levels, and despite frequent entreaties from the United States as the leader of the alliance, the majority of NATO members still do not meet even the basic target of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence, with Germany at only around 1.7% this year, and Spain barely at even 1%. Given all that, the correlation of forces is now moving in Moscow’s favour, at least in its eyes, and that smacks of opportunity. The recent presentation of a draft security treaty by Russia to western nations—primarily to the United States—has to be seen in that context.”
“Despite all the emphasis on satellite technology, multi-domain operations, artificial intelligence, the integrating operating concept and all the other buzzword bingo that peppers the MOD’s lexicon these days, NATO was still defeated for all the world to see. Indeed, for all its supposedly dazzling advanced technology, NATO was ultimately run out of town by “a bunch of country boys” without an ability to fight credibly in four of the five established domains—space, cyber, air or sea—and armed mainly with AK-47s, Motorola radios and RPGs. That outcome has surely not gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing, nor indeed in Tehran. While the west indulges in paralysis by analysis, the Russians build more tanks, tactical and strategic aircraft and hypersonic missiles and renew their nuclear arsenal.”
“Moreover, Germany continues selfishly to pursue a “beggar thy neighbour” energy policy sympathetic to Nord Stream 2, making it potentially even easier for Russia to deploy the gas weapon. France, another key NATO member, with high readiness and military capabilities analogous to those of the UK—including, crucially, its own independent nuclear deterrent—is largely absorbed with the forthcoming presidential election this spring. The outcome of that election is highly uncertain, but some of the candidates, such as Éric Zemmour, who in 2013 declared Vladimir Putin as his own man of the year, worry me. Overall, NATO, the most successful defensive alliance in history, which the Soviet Union once respected and even feared, has recently been defeated in Afghanistan, much as its Soviet forebears were many years ago.”
“For many years during the cold war when the Berlin wall was up, the German armed forces were highly operationally capable, held at high readiness and poised to vigorously resist any incursion by Warsaw pact forces across the inner German border. Today, despite the wall having come down, Germany’s armed forces are a shadow of their former selves, with severe equipment problems and worryingly low levels of operational availability. Politically, the long-standing and relatively stable Merkel era is now over. The former German Chancellor, a fluent Russian speaker, who reportedly had a strong personal relationship with President Putin, has now been replaced by a new and inexperienced traffic light coalition, including a pacifist Green party drag anchor that is unlikely to countenance any meaningful German military reform.”
“The growing obsession of the American strategic community with China may arguably be unwelcome in Beijing, but I suspect that it is very welcome in Moscow. As just one simple example of that, despite the presidential election being 14 months ago, and regardless of the UK traditionally being America’s strongest and most consistent ally in NATO, the United States has still not formally appointed a new ambassador to the Court of St James’s to replace the popular and charismatic Woody Johnson. Do we really believe that these signals just go completely unnoticed elsewhere? How about some of the other major NATO allies—how are they perceived in the east?”
“If we adopt that conceptual approach, at least for the purposes of this debate, what does the current coalition of forces look like, specifically between NATO and Russia, particularly when viewed from Moscow? Without wishing to be unkind, the United States has an ageing President with isolationist tendencies whose popularity is now waning barely a year into the job. In addition, only a year ago the American Parliament, Congress, was stormed by its own citizens—admittedly in bizarre circumstances, but it was overwhelmed nevertheless. The United States, once the proud leader of the western democracies and advocate of the Pax Americana, now seems increasingly absorbed by its own internal divisions—more worried by the politics of identity than those of global security.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this timely debate, which the Backbench Business Committee should be commended for granting so early in the new year and which was so ably introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). To start as I mean to go on, I fear that the European skies are now darkening, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the winter weather. Perhaps I might explain why. When I was enjoying war studies at King’s under Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman many years ago, I learned that during the cold war the Soviets often referred to the concept of the correlation of forces—effectively a comparison of strengths and weaknesses, both political and military, between opposing blocs.”
“If Ministers really want to boost housing supply, let us have a full inquiry by the Competition and Markets Authority on over-concentration in the UK house building industry, and let us have it now.”
“We have limited time, Mr Betts, so I will not read all the communications into the record. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to do on Second Reading of the planning Bill, so that Ministers, parliamentary colleagues, the media and others in the house building industry can learn how Bloor Homes really behaves. In summary, the UK house building sector is deeply troubled, bordering on dysfunctional. Many ordinary families are struggling to buy a home, while some of the major house builders ruthlessly exploit their agony to maintain their already generous profit margins. They blame everyone but themselves: Government, MPs, local authorities or concerned local residents—anyone but the greedy companies that are at the heart of the problem.”
“Bloor Homes, one of the largest privately owned developers in Britain, was so desperate to secure planning permission for a highly controversial site off Ashingdon Road in my constituency that it resorted to trying to interfere with the composition of the development control committee of Rochford District Council, which was due to consider the application last June. Bloor having lost—the committee turned it down—Bloor’s political consultant sent a series of highly intemperate, even offensive, texts late at night to the leader of the council. It is the sheer arrogance of these tactics, which I have not previously encountered in over 30 years of public life as a councillor and then as an MP, that I find deeply shocking. This is the sad reality of house building in Britain today.”
“In October 2020, the Campaign to Protect Rural England produced a report highlighting that over half a million of these plots alone are on brownfield sites. A former chief executive of Persimmon Homes stood down after getting his £75 million bonus—a bonus so profane that it embarrassed not just his company but the rest of the industry. Perhaps he was untroubled by these facts. Nevertheless, some of the practices we have heard about from colleagues this morning still go on. Where, one has to ask, are Ministers—and, indeed, the Competition and Markets Authority—in all of this? I come to my third point. Let me give a practical example of how truly arrogant some of these companies have become.”
“Covid is likely to have made that serious market anomaly worse by increasing the pressure on smaller builders, many of whom have limited financial reserves. As Liam Halligan argues, “An oligopolistic house building sector, deliberately restricting the supply of new homes to keep profits high, is anathema to free markets.” But it is even worse than that. The paradigm that the Government appear to be working in is one where house building is held back by nimby local authorities, despite the best efforts of house builders to build new homes. In fact, the reverse is true. As the Local Government Association pointed out in February 2020, there are over 1 million extant planning permissions for new properties, but these have not been built out.”
“That restricts choice, and, even more importantly, artificially restricts housing supply. That is done deliberately to keep prices up. Liam Halligan, economics editor of the Sunday Telegraph and now a popular TV presenter, explored the problem in great detail in his very good 2019 book, “Home Truths: The UK's chronic housing shortage”, in which he exposes the adverse effects of the dominance of the volume house builders on the housing market. For instance, as Liam Halligan points out, since the Office of Fair Trading’s investigation into the housing sector in 2008, the market share of the volume house builders has more than doubled, from 31% to 59%—not far off two thirds of the entire market.”
“That has led to the iniquitous situation whereby the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities continues to harry local authorities to finalise their local plans, despite holding back legislation that, once enacted, might mean that local councils have to revise or even substantially rewrite the plans that many of them have just spent literally years working on. It is becoming a bit like “Waiting for Godot”. To put it another way, the Department should remove the plank from its own eye. I humbly ask the Minister: when can we expect the publication of the planning Bill, and when is Second Reading likely to be? Secondly, the UK housing market is now effectively an example of near market failure. It is completely dominated by half a dozen or so major house builders, some of whom have grown over the years by absorbing competitors.”
“A very happy new year to you, Mr Betts. As we have limited time, I will make three points. First, I have served as an MP for over 20 years, and the whole issue of housing development and the associated infrastructure remains the most controversial issue in my constituency. One of the things I have learned from that is that in order to be accepted by local people, development must be done with people, rather than to people, but the major house builders rarely seem to understand that. The legislative framework within which the house building industry has to operate is obviously fundamental, but we are still awaiting the publication of the Government’s much-delayed planning Bill.”
“It is disappointing that the Minister cannot give any timings on when the planning Bill is coming, because some of us would like to know before we retire. He has heard 10 very good Back-Bench contributions in this debate, all of which have been, in one way or another, highly critical of the housebuilding industry in this country. When will the Government support a Competition and Markets Authority inquiry into the UK housebuilding industry?”
“After four years, two general election manifestos and a hand-signed pledge by the Prime Minister, where is the legacy Bill? The Northern Ireland Secretary promised this House that we would have it, to help to protect Northern Ireland veterans from endless investigation and reinvestigation, by the summer recess—he broke his word. Then he faithfully promised that the legislation would be introduced into Parliament by “the end of the autumn” —[ Official Report , 14 July 2021; Vol. 699, c. 398-399.] We now have the business up to Christmas and there is still no Bill. If the Secretary of State repeatedly breaks his word to the House of Commons, he has no honourable option but to resign. He has let down his party and the people who fought to uphold the law in Northern Ireland. When will Brandon Lewis resign his seals of office?”
“The Secretary of State keeps threatening to invoke article 16, but he never quite gets round to doing it, does he? There is a pattern of behaviour here: the Secretary of State talks a great game but he never plays one. Where is your Bill, Brandon?”
“The Leader of the House gave us the business until 13 December, but the House rises on 16 December, so we still have three unallocated days. After four years, two general election manifestos and a pledge in a national newspaper hand-signed by the Prime Minister, still we have not introduced the much-delayed legislation to end the cycle of endless investigations against Northern Ireland veterans. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland told us we would have it by the summer recess, and he faithfully promised that it would be into Parliament by the end of the autumn. I think we can agree that Christmas means the end of the autumn. In the three-day window that remains, I earnestly ask the Leader of the House to ensure that that legislation appears—#wheresyourbillbrandon.”
“The member of the Committee, doing their job, presses them harder, and the witness says, “I’m sorry, but I regard your behaviour as an unreasonable and excessive personal attack, and if you continue this line of questioning I’m going to report you to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.” To take another example—this is important, Madam Deputy Speaker—Member A and Member B have a heated disagreement in the Chamber, and someone watching on television writes to the commissioner and says, “I think A made an excessive personal attack on B, and I want you to investigate it.” The point is that this paragraph seriously impinges on article 9 of the Bill of Rights, if we take it literally, so here is my consultation submission early on: this is actually dangerous, and it should not appear in the final version.”
“May I refer the Chairman to paragraph 58 on page 19 of the report? I take the point he has made very clearly that these are proposals for consultation and could be changed. However, the paragraph says: “We therefore support the addition to the Code of a rule similar to those adopted by the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly, making it an investigable breach of the Code for a Member to subject anyone to unreasonable and excessive personal attack in any medium”, which presumably includes the Chamber and Select Committees. [ Interruption. ] Well, if we read it literally, that is how we would interpret it. Let me give the Chairman a quick scenario. In a Select Committee, a Member is pressing a witness, maybe about some Government procurement programme that has gone horribly wrong, and they are reluctant to answer.”
“The British Army cannot fight without effective kit, but the Public Accounts Committee has declared the MOD’s procurement system “broken”, which it is, and has described the General Dynamics Ajax programme as a catastrophe. The next debacle is the Morpheus programme to replace Bowman, which also has General Dynamics effectively in the lead, and is horribly late and going round in circles as Bowman becomes increasingly obsolescent. Will the Secretary of State take personal grip of Ajax and Morpheus? What steps is he taking to ensure that his officials who brief him on those programmes tell him the truth?”
“A fortnight ago, the all-party Public Accounts Committee published the most damning report it has ever produced on MOD procurement, including helicopter procurement. The report concluded: “To meet the aspirations of the Integrated Review, the Department’s broken system for acquiring military equipment needs an urgent rethink, led by HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office.” Given that not one of the top 36 MOD procurement programmes—worth £150 billion of taxpayers’ money—is fully on track, who, either at Abbey Wood or on the fifth floor of the MOD, is going to accept personal responsibility? When will the Secretary of State bring in the Cabinet Office to clean up the MOD’s mess?”
“Hello, it’s me again. I will gladly take the Secretary of State up on his offer of a meeting about procurement, but there is an old Army saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This is broke—it is official. This is the worst report on MOD procurement in living memory, Ben. We both know it is, so can we please do something about it and put it right?”
“I apologise to you, Mr Davies, and to the Minister that I cannot be here for the whole debate because I am about to attend a remembrance service in the Guards’ Chapel. No disrespect is intended. May I pay a family tribute? My late father, Reginald Francois, was on a minesweeper on D-day. There were many reasons why Operation Overlord succeeded, but one undoubtedly was the ceaseless courage of the unarmed PRU pilots who flew multiple missions to successfully reconnoitre the Normandy coast so that the allied invasion could be best planned. From the son of a D-Day veteran, I offer my hon. Friend unstinting support for his campaign, and thank him and his predecessor for having the courage to raise it in this place. We wish him Godspeed.”
“After more than four years, two general election manifestos and a hand-signed promise in The Sun newspaper from the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State has delivered nothing. My question is very straightforward: “Where is your Bill, Brandon?””
“I am absolutely determined—I ask for the House’s support in this—that he will not have died in vain. He is now resting in the arms of the God he worshipped devotedly his whole life, so farewell David, my colleague, my great friend—in fact, quite simply the best bloke I ever knew. I thank the House for its indulgence.”
“What better way to ensure that a fine parliamentarian did not die in vain than to enshrine one of his last wishes in legislation forever, for the benefit of all those in public life? Many Members wish to pay tribute, so I will end with this: another thing about David was his legendary timekeeping, or rather lack of it. His constituency events always ran late because he was so popular and so many people wanted to speak to him. By the end of a busy constituency Friday, of which he had many, he was sometimes running up to an hour late—he invariably overran, and this afternoon, in his honour, so have I; sorry, Mr Speaker—but what better fault to have than that wonderful trait? Among some of his closest friends, he was known affectionately as the late Sir David Amess. Well, now he really is the late Sir David Amess.”
“Let us also do that for all our councillors, who are sick and tired of reading on Facebook after every planning committee meeting the night before, that “it must have been a brown envelope job”. Let us do it for all those other people who hold surgeries, including our GPs who have carried on tending to the sick throughout the pandemic but who are now being vilified online, along with their loyal receptionists and staff, just for trying to do their job. If the social media companies do not want to help us to drain the Twitter swamp, let us compel them to do it by law, because they have had more than enough chances to do it voluntarily. Please bring in this Bill, Prime Minister, and if you need any assistance in toughening it up, we are called the Back Benchers of the House of Commons and we are here to help.”
“If I may be so presumptuous, let us put “David’s law” on to the statute book, the essence of which would be that, while people in public life must remain open to legitimate criticism, they could no longer be vilified or their families subjected to the most horrendous abuse, especially from people who hide behind a cloak of anonymity, with the connivance of the social media companies for profit. The mood I am in, I confess that I would like to drag Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter to the Bar of the House, kicking and screaming if necessary, so that they could look us all in the eye and account for their actions, or rather their inactions, which are making them even richer than they already are.”
“Another fallen comrade, Jo Cox, whose sister now graces this place, said that we have more in common than that which divides us, and I think she was absolutely right. All of us, wherever we come from, came here to try to help people. We may disagree, sometimes passionately, about how best to help people, but surely we could all agree that we came here to try. For this, we are now systematically vilified day after day, and I simply say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that enough is enough. We all have one thing in common: we are legislators. So I humbly suggest that we get on and do some legislating. I suggest that if we want to ensure that our colleague did not die in vain, we all collectively pick up the baton, regardless of party, and take the forthcoming Online Safety Bill and toughen it up markedly.”
“However, David also had a serious side, and it is that on which I want to focus the rest of my speech. In the last few years, he had become increasingly concerned about what he called the toxic environment in which MPs, particularly female MPs, were having to operate. He was appalled by what he called the vile misogynistic abuse that female MPs had to endure online, and he told me recently that he wanted something done about it. Three years ago, my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries) wrote a powerful article about this on ConservativeHome in which she quoted the following social media post: “I want to see you, trapped in a burning car and watch as the heat from the flames melts the flesh from your face.” I ask you, Mr Speaker, what did she ever do to deserve that?”
“For him the glass was never half empty; it was three quarters full. He was a doughty champion for Basildon and then for Southend. So thank you, Prime Minister—and I thank Her Majesty and the Privy Council—for making Southend a city after all. It was the right thing to do; and our apologies to Cleethorpes! While you are at it, Prime Minister, perhaps you can help Southend United: they are going through a bit of a sticky patch, and they really need all the help they can get. You never knew what David was going to do next. That Essex “cheeky chappie” smile, that impish Amess grin, always with a hint of gentle mischief behind it. He once even persuaded His Holiness the Pope to bless a boiled sweet, as my friend and neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), will explain in a moment.”
“Well done.” My partner Olivia and I were due to be on David’s table at the Southend West Conservatives’ annual dinner on the day he was murdered. But David is now our fallen comrade. He was a devoted and a loving family man, and our deepest sympathies are with his widow, Julia, and his five children, who produced the most amazingly courageous statement, the essence of which was, I think, that love must conquer hate. I am sure we all agree with that. He was an animal-lover, a patriot, a Thatcherite, a Eurosceptic, a monarchist, a staunch Roman Catholic whose faith sustained him throughout his life, a truly great friend to those in need—I can vouch for that—and a fine parliamentarian. He was probably the best potential Father of the House we will now never have. David had a zest for life, a joie de vivre.”
“David helped me to campaign in 1991 to win election to Basildon Council—quite a robust place to learn one’s trade, and once described as the only local authority in Britain where at council meetings the councillors actively heckled the public gallery. I was there. Trust me: I’m a politician. In return, I ran David’s ground war in his iconic defence of Basildon in 1992. During that campaign, the late Paul Channon came down from Southend to help, and we were out canvassing on a council estate in Pitsea. I will never forget that. We knocked on a door, and a monster of a bloke answered it. He looked at us both, and he looked at the blue rosettes, and he said, “Conservative? Tory? You must be bloody joking, mate— I’m voting for that David Amess!” I said, “I know when I’m beat, sir.”
“Sir David Amess was my best and oldest friend in politics, so I confess that I am hurting terribly, and I hope the House will forgive me if, because of that, my contribution this afternoon is even more incoherent than usual. I certainly cannot match those two beautiful and, if I may say so, extremely moving tributes from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. I thank them. Everything that I ever learned about how to be a constituency MP, I learned from David Amess. He sponsored me for the candidates list, and he mentored me when I arrived. Without him, I would never have become a Member of Parliament, so some might well argue that he has much to answer for. I grew up in Basildon when David was the local MP. I grew up on a working-class council estate which even the locals nicknamed Alcatraz.”
“I, too, welcome the AUKUS deal, which gives great form to global Britain and could be very good for jobs in both Barrow and Derby. Can we remind the Australians, when they begin their 18-month assessment, that the UK’s Astute submarine is arguably even more capable than the United States’ Virginia class? And, by the way, it is cheaper.”
“I commend my right hon. and learned Friend and his team on their excellent TIGRR report and on his very welcome statement. If he needs a uniform, I am sure Gieves & Hawkes will be happy to oblige him, for a reasonable fee. He said in his statement that we will establish a commission “to receive ideas from any British citizen on how to repeal or improve regulations”. I urge him to go further and include EU citizens—in particular, Michel Barnier, the former chief negotiator, who is now running to be President of France and has developed very strong views about repealing EU legislation that affects France. If he does not want to live under its laws any more, can we ask him to suggest which of its heritage laws we should junk as well? And as the Government will want to get on with it, can we remind Mr Barnier that the clock is now ticking?”
“You are 36-0 down, you have got a broken system and you are in total denial. What are you doing about it?”
“This £4 billion debacle is an example of exactly why the MOD’s procurement process is completely broken. The IPA analysis has already been referred to. Each year, it goes through the top 36 MOD procurement programmes and grades them with a traffic light. Ajax is red, unlikely ever to be achieved. How many of the 36 were green and successfully on track? None. Zero, zilch, nothing. Not one major MOD procurement programme is successfully on track. This is over £100 billion of British taxpayers’ money. The procurement system at Abbey Wood is a shambles, and presiding over this steaming heap of institutional incompetence is the Minister. You are losing 36-0 on behalf of the British taxpayer. [ Interruption. ] It might be nice if you were not laughing about it. This is massive amounts of taxpayers’ money.”
“The Prime Minister reminded the House that the Afghans had lost 70,000 men whom we helped to train and whom we fought alongside, even though some of them were not paid for many months because of endemic corruption in Kabul. Does my right hon. Friend agree that to imply, as some have, that they basically ran away, when for 10 years and more they had done precisely the opposite, is shameful?”
“If the midterm results in the United States are more important than the security and freedom of the free world, we had better work out pretty quickly what global Britain means, because it seems that global America just fell off its horse and died.”
“Our own National Security Council was caught completely flatfooted, although the Defence Secretary, to his eternal credit, did, perhaps with a soldier’s instincts, appreciate what was going to happen and sought desperately to assemble a coalition of the willing among European nations, only to discover they were anything but willing to prevent what happened next. What do these events mean not just for Afghanistan but for the security of the strait of Hormuz, the Baltic states, Ukraine or even Taiwan? NATO has been the cornerstone of our security for more than 70 years, and it has just suffered a strategic defeat for the first time in its history. I am terribly sorry, as an Atlanticist all my life, that President Biden’s deeply isolationist speech on Monday was extremely worrying.”
“When NATO needlessly withdrew key enablers on which the Afghan army still relied for protection, their morale rapidly collapsed. This was a NATO mission, which began as an article 5 request when the United States suffered a terrorist Pearl Harbor on 9/11. They asked for our help and we gave it. Twenty years on, whether we blame President Trump for a bad deal with the Taliban or President Biden, who, remember, on 8 July told the American people, “There’s going to be no circumstances where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan”, the buck stops with him—oh yes, it does. But we are not blameless in Britain either.”
“Winston Churchill said: “Wars are not won by evacuations.” —[ Official Report, 4 June 1940; Vol. 361, c. 791.] The debacle we have sadly just witnessed in Afghanistan was more akin to the fall of Saigon than to the miracle of Dunkirk. There is no hiding from the fact that we have just suffered a most grievous defeat. Our 150,000 veterans fought bravely in the noble cause of a better life for the ordinary people of Afghanistan. It is not their fault. We now have 457 compelling reasons for learning from this. I support the call from the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Chairman of the Defence Committee for a Franks-style inquiry to learn what went wrong. Another war leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, once said: “The moral is to the physical as three is to one”.”
“I warmly welcome the statement for both its timeliness and its content. In the negotiations that the Secretary of State and Lord Frost are plainly keen to have with the European Union, will they look seriously at the option of mutual enforcement, as advocated by none other than the Nobel peace prize winner Lord Trimble, as a way through these challenges? As the Secretary of State reminded the House, the EU invoked article 16 back in January, not us. If the EU continues to be unreasonable despite every effort to persuade it, are we prepared, in extremis, to use article 16 and, if necessary, even to legislate domestically to maintain the integrity of the United Kingdom?”
“If the House will not take it from him, it could take it from the Nobel prize winner Lord Trimble, who has pointed out, importantly in this context also to audiences in the United States, who follow these matters closely, that the Northern Ireland protocol no longer enjoys the consent of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. Very wisely, in my view, he has recommended a system of mutual enforcement as a far better alternative.”
“One thing, though, that all protagonists in this debate seem to agree about is their willingness and, in fact, strong desire to uphold the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which has indeed been crucial in bringing peace and stability to Northern Ireland for over two decades. It is fundamentally based on the principle of consent, as the leader of the Democratic Unionist party, the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson), and his colleagues have reminded us, but it is now as plain as a pikestaff that the Northern Ireland protocol no longer enjoys the consent of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. If the House will not take that from me, it could take it from the new leader of the DUP, whom I wish all the best with his onerous responsibilities at this time.”
“Invoking article 16 in that way was, I think it is fair to say, widely derided as a mistake, and the European Commission withdrew it by the cold light of morning. The Commission was really doing it for internal reasons, because of, among other things, the slow roll-out of vaccines, unfortunately, on the continent; nevertheless, the fact that it did it, when it clearly should not have done, means that our Prime Minister is absolutely entitled, as he has said many times, to keep article 16 on the table if the European Commission refuses to be reasonable in renegotiating the Northern Ireland protocol, or even replacing it.”